Wesleyan’s Title III Grant Comes to a Close
Fall 2005 marks the ending of Wesleyan’s five-year, $1.75 million Title III grant, the largest grant of its kind received in college history. Awarded in 2000, the grant has helped strengthen Wesleyan as an institution by coordinating and funding strategies to increase student retention and success through improvement of academic programs and faculty development.
Under Activity I, four overarching goals were established to increase student retention and success through improvement of academic programs and faculty development. Title III funds were used to (1) provide for the resources needed to create a student digital assessment portfolio; (2) increase computer technology in the classrooms; (3) design a comprehensive faculty development program to improve teaching methodologies; and (4) establish a writing lab.
Through the help of Title III, the College successfully created a student digital assessment portfolio and more. The purchase of WebAdvisor provided faculty and, for the first time, students with the ability to monitor student academic progress online. Providing students with easy access to their own academic information has helped them become more proactive and less dependent on advisors in making decisions about their education and finances, something that is a goal of academic advisors across the country.
Using Title III funds, the College also purchased Campus Cruiser, an internet portal, by which students and faculty can access a suite of online resources such as e-mail; a personalized homepage; an academic calendar; and links to all their courses, internship information, clubs, teams, and other campus organizations. Campus Cruiser also provides users with access to the Wesleyan Intranet and WebAdvisor for advising purposes. Besides dramatically improving communication between members of Wesleyan’s Rocky Mount, Raleigh, and Goldsboro campuses, Campus Cruiser has also provided a online course management system (CMS) that offers faculty a framework with which to supplement traditional classes with important online tools and initiate the school’s Distance Education Program.
After seeing the possibilities for online learning created by Campus Cruiser, the College used Title III funds to purchase WebCT, a true CMS, to establish a more robust platform upon which to expand its Distance Education Program and to support further use of online technology in traditional courses. The purchase of all three tools, which have been readily adopted by students and faculty alike, has enabled the College to achieve its goal of creating a student digital assessment portfolio while significantly improving the College’s technology infrastructure in the process.
Thanks to Title III, the College has had great success in increasing its classroom computer technology. The goal of the grant was to upgrade 20% of all North Carolina Wesleyan classrooms with multimedia technology, and the College exceeded this goal by 38%. Fifteen of Wesleyan’s twenty-six classrooms/labs feature multimedia equipment including instructor computer stations—with Internet, VCR, CD-ROM, and DVD capabilities; video projectors and screens; and ceiling audio. In addition, three of these classrooms were outfitted with SmartBoards, while X laptops and portable projectors were purchased for use in “traditional classrooms.” Faculty and students report that these upgrades have been welcomed as they have changed the way people teach and learn at Wesleyan.
The comprehensive faculty development program sponsored by Title III has given a great boost to faculty and, in turn, their students at North Carolina Wesleyan College. In each of the first four years, roughly six faculty members redesigned their curricula of either general education and/or lower level courses, by infusing technology or different pedagogy into their instruction. In Year 5, we conducted a faculty-wide workshop on critical thinking, the foundation of all courses. To date, faculty development themes have included expanding awareness of teaching/learning styles, incorporating multimedia and multiculturalism into the classroom, developing course assessment methods, creating online courses, and incorporating critical thinking and information literacy into the curriculum.
The Title III faculty development project has created professional development opportunities where few existed before which has boosted faculty morale in knowing that the College values their professional growth. The project has also made a positive impact by increasing the development of online and hybrid courses—traditional courses supplemented with online and multimedia components. A large part of the project’s success must be attributed to the Instructional Technologist (IT), Dr. Weimin Wang, whose position was largely funded by Title III funds. Over the past four years, he has played an important role in assisting Title III administrators and the Dean of the College in promoting the use of technology among faculty and staff at Wesleyan.
Another important part of the Title III project has been the hiring of a Writing Lab Director and the development of the NCWC Writing Lab, which has provided writing resources where none had previously existed. In its four years of existence, the Writing Lab has conducted over 3,300 tutorials, including over 1,200 online tutorials with Adult Degree students from all of the school’s campuses. Writing lab workshops accounted for more than 2,900 additional student contacts, while the online writing lab received over 14,000 visitors. Several studies conducted to determine the relationship between the Writing Lab and student success in freshman English courses suggested that students in ENG 111 who use the Writing Lab will achieve somewhere in the range of .63-.78 higher grade than students who don’t use the Lab. Student and faculty surveys of Writing Lab services recorded satisfaction rates well into the 90-percentile range.